Out of the box, no current Windows version, including Windows Server 2003, supports SATA drives.

My best guess is that the BIOS enables some sort of PATA emulation that Windows can use to find that drive. That's the only thing that makes sense.

And I was a little hard on VMware, to be honest. I mean, I was using a feature that they specifically warn against most people using, while running 32-bit VMware on a 64-bit (unsupported variant of a) host OS. I'm reminded of a quote here...